Lot 350: Horace Bundy (American, 1814-1883) Portrait of Young Ellen Fairbank of Winchendon, Massachusetts. Unsigned, the back of the frame pa...

Horace Bundy (American, 1814-1883)

Portrait of Young Ellen Fairbank of Winchendon, Massachusetts. Unsigned, the back of the frame panel is inscribed "Ellen Fairbank 1846-1914 H.Bundy Painter 1852." Oil on canvas, oval portrait depicting the girl wearing a blue dress, one hand grasping a glass vase filled with flowers, the other hand holding several stalks of grain, 29 x 23 1/2 in., in the original oval gilt-gesso frame. Condition: Very good.

Note: The portrait is accompanied by a sixth-plate daguerreotype depicting Ellen, wearing the same style of dress, standing beside a sleeping dog, housed in a Union case, and an 11 x 14 in. portrait of Ellen taken in 1913 when she was sixty-seven years old.

According to the Vital Records of Winchendon Massachusetts to the Year 1850, p. 30, Ellen Sophia Fairbank was born November 13, 1846. She was the daughter of Sidney and Ann (Statia), Fairbank.

Horace Bundy was an itinerant artist and Adventist preacher in New England in the 1840s and 1850s and was working in the Winchendon, Massachusetts, area at the time this portrait was done, c. 1852. In November of 2004 Skinner sold a portrait by Bundy of George and Henry Whitcomb, of Winchendon, which was dated April 1852.